Blank canvas. Raijintek Paean case. Modding to come!
We realized quickly that the EVGA 1080Ti FTW3 w/ EK Waterblock was going to be heavier than the vertical GPU mount could handle safely (in our expert opinion). Drilling holes to fasten the newly fabricated vertical GPU support brackets to the case.
We grabbed a few basic brackets from Home Depot then cut them to fit.
We realized quickly that the EVGA 1080Ti FTW3 w/ EK Waterblock was going to be heavier than the vertical GPU mount could handle safely (in our expert opinion)
Testing ideas before the above fabricated mods were finalized. As you can see the GPU needed some additional support. Pictured is the Raijintek Vertical mount, ended up sending it back and going with the coolermaster mount, which had to be modded (of course)!
Pulling a 1080Ti apart is always fun... and nerve wracking!
Smooth transition to the EK Waterblock!
Finally we were able to start actually building the PC vs modding the case.
Starting to look like a computer not a piece of scrap metal! Decided to go with a AlphaCool X45 360mm. Wanted to spread the tubing out to have as little blank space as possible so we decided tubing coming from the top and bottom of the rad would look best.
All the tubing in place and ready to fill. Fingers crossed for no leaks!
pretty cables thanks to cablemod!
Project Complete! SO WE THOUGHT!
One radiator just didn't keep it as cool as we had thought. So a few weeks later we added another AlphaCool 45mm 360 to the back, not an Xflow this time. This required a substantial amount of modding and thinking outside of the box. This case is not designed to mount 2 radiators. We were able to fabricated a mount to the case and then the radiator to the mounting rails.
This is the rail we fabricated. Everything we used can be found at Home Depot.
Radiator successfully installed. This took longer than expected. Close to 2 hours.
We had to rethink our tubing layout now that we added an additional radiator. Few changes but nothing major.
Not completely level on the tubing but didn't have much room to work with. Just had to make that part work. This is the back of the case.
Hard to tell be we had to notch the SSD/HD bracket with the dremel so that we could run the tubing where we wanted.
Added a set of BeQuiet Wing 3 fans to the back radiator.
COMPLETE! For real this time! You can see instead of running the tubing from GPU to CPU we routed the tubing from the GPU exit to the second radiator in the back and then from that 2nd back rad to the CPU. We were able to drastically reduce the temps from the original layout we had created. Again, this case was NOT created to run double rads, so a lot of modding and fabricating took place.